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More librarians are taking an interest in exploring how user experience design, coupled with a design thinking mindset, can help them deliver a better library experience to their community members. This is evidenced by the increase in libraries adding user experience librarian positions and even UX units, going beyond user satisfaction surveys and into ethnographic research to truly understand the library experience from the user perspective. There is also an increase in the number of librarians writing articles about UX and giving presentations on related topics. Expect to see more conferences and workshops based on UX themes. This trend is moving the library profession beyond perceiving UX only as a method to improve the online experience to acknowledging that it applies, perhaps more importantly, to the total library experience.

As they grow more interested in adopting UX approaches, I hope librarians will take time to read and understand how UX evolved into a recognized dimension of competition in multiple industries. For example, reading Pine and Gilmore’s seminal work The Experience Economy, would offer perspective on how industry moved from competing on price and convenience to competing on the quality of the experience (e.g., convenience store coffee vs. starbucks). This demonstrated that people (not everyone but many) would be willing to pay a premium for a better experience – and that could be defined by taste, treatment, ambience, etc. The end result was to design an experience that exceeded expectations, created meaning and loyalty and gave the consumer a memorable experience that sparked the consumer’s desire to repeat it.

We may now be moving beyond the experience economy into the “purist economy.” Today, there are only a few industries exploring this territory and there are limited numbers of consumers who seek out this level of experience. More than a few experts believe that what is a small market today could be the next wave on which service and product industries compete, outdoing each other to deliver the purist possible experience. According to an article titled “Brewing the Perfect Cup” by Danielle Sacks in September 2014 issue of Fast Company, the third wave is a movement of purists who are committed to taking every part of an experience to the level of obsession with quality, uniqueness (not just being different – more than that) and quite possibly an elitism that sets the purist apart from the mere aficionado.

Just as Starbucks succeeded in moving coffee lovers from convenience store brands and office coffee pots to $4 expressos and frappucchinos, a new generation of firms want to tap into those coffee lovers and convert them into purists. One of those companies is called Joyride and its mission is to spread:

…coffee religion. It is one of a rising army of startups seizing on the financial opportunity to convert Keurig, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks drinkers into coffee purists. Known as the Third Wave, this movement started a decade ago by a splinter group of true believers who approach every part of the coffee life cycle with meticulous obsession…a cup of black coffee so dimensional, they believe, that there’s no need to pollute it with milk or sweeteners–and so valuable that it can earn a price tag as hefty as $7 a cup.

The article points to this as a growing food trend noting that “yogurt, chocolate, and juice have made this leap from commodity to mass delicacy”. Want to offend a coffee purist? Put milk in your java. One purist likened it to putting ketchup on a steak. No wonder some coffee drinkers regard purists as elitists or snobs – but snobs who will pay an even higher premium for an even better experience. And as they have their third wave experience, purists are not apologetic. Rather, they revel in their enjoyment of a higher form of experience.

It’s hard to predict if these third wave experiences will go mainstream or remain limited to a small cadre of purists. The firms bringing the products and services to the marketplace certainly hope they can convince coffee lovers to become purists who can tell the difference between obscure flavors with just a few sips of a black coffee. This movement, to my way of thinking, goes into territory beyond the superuser. The superuser is certainly passionate about a product, and can make the difference between its success or failure, but enjoying a product and discovering new ways to use it is not quite on the same as the purist’s insistence on only the best and being willing to pay a significant premium to get it.

Offering a higher quality experience can also have the affect of turning a community member into a more passionate library user. There are examples from other service providers that benefit from designing experiences for the passionate people who really thrive on what is being offered – usually something that cannot be easily obtained through the Internet. It may be the person in your community who eagerly anticipates new and unique acquisitions, seeks out historic artifacts found in special collections and archives or who appreciates cultural programming. We lack the capacity to reach every person in our communities. It may be wise to avoid expending effort to attract those who will never connect with librarians or who may believe that libraries no longer offer value to the community. Passionate library user. Yes, we can reach them and design experiences to create a bond. Purist library user? While it would no doubt be advantageous to have a core of such committed supporters, it is also possible that an obsessive community member could have a much higher level of expectation – and demands – than most libraries could meet.

It will be interesting to see if the third wave experience has a significant impact on our coffee consumption behavior. If it does, and there is evidence that a segment of any market desires the purist experience, expect to see similar types of movements in other services and products. Before Starbucks none of us would have thought it possible that people would routinely go out of their way for coffee beverages at double or triple the price. Now no one thinks twice about it. Never underestimate the power of the human desire for unique and memorable experiences, and where it will lead.

When Ranganathan stated his fourth law of library science, “Save the Time of the Reader” he probably did not intend for us to create a library experience that operates under the same principles as a fast food restaurant – whose fourth law just happens to be “Save the Time of the Eater”.

What Ranganathan most likely intended was for us to be efficient and knowledgeable so as to avoid squandering the time of our community members, yet not be so overly hurried that we deliver a rushed and impersonalized interaction – one that might seem more at home at a fast food restaurant.

Ranganathan lived in a rather different world than our own. In 1931, when he developed his theory of the five laws, the world moved at a much slower pace. “Save the time of the reader” was an encouragement to be well organized and efficient so the reader would be able to efficiently access needed resources. We live in a world where people expect instant gratification, instant access and instant support. Their lack of tolerance for waiting almost demands that libraries are designed to save time.

Perhaps we ought to give this some thought. Maybe the library should look for exceptions to the fourth law. Quite possibly there are times when we should break the fourth law and do things to encourage users to expend and not save time.Libraries could offer a different experience that encourages slowing down, being leisurely – forgetting to check the clock for a while.

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that the presence (and patronage) of fast food restaurants can contribute to a heightened impatience and a lowered tolerance for waiting. Their experiments, which prompted participants just to think about or see reminders of fast food chains, revealed that these stimuli cause people to rush through their reading, express a desire for timesaving products and express less happiness from certain types of slow music. While acknowledging there are multiple factors in our lives that contribute to our impatience and need for speed, they believe we can take steps to improve our patience and appreciation for taking more time to savor life – such as avoiding stimuli like fast food joints or intentionally seeking out spaces or experiences that reward slowing down the pace.

It’s been said that convenience trumps quality every time. That may explain why fast food restaurants stay in business. I’m not suggesting we can improve the library experience by making it inconvenient. I do believe there might be something of value in being the place in our communities where people can get that counter-stimulus, the one that contributes to an appreciation that it takes time and some effort to achieve high quality outcomes.

The library as the place that invites you to slow down and enjoy some browsing. Come in and talk to a librarian about your reading or research interests. Sit in on a lecture or book club discussion. Get absorbed in a new idea and immerse yourself in the literature. There will no doubt be times when efficiency and saving the time of the reader takes priority. I think we can aspire to be the place where there’s more to life than getting the fast food treatment.

One of the early design thinking influences for me and other librarians was the Maya Design Project for the Carnegie Libraries in Pittsburgh. In 2004 the Carnegie Library moved into some unprecendented territory when it hired Maya Design to totally rethink and redesign the library from the user experience perspective. This being the early days of the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community, we were tremendously interested in learning more about how design was being used as a technique to understand user needs and expectations, and how the design process was being applied to the work of reshaping that library.

We were also fascinated that non-librarians were invited to do all this work. That type of work would seemingly fall within the domain of librarian expertise. What did the designers know about libraries and those who used them? What special skills did they bring to the project? The answers came from Aradhana Goel, one of the MAYA Design experts leading the project. As our guest for a Blended Librarians webcast (unfortunately the archive is no longer available) Goel gave us some great insights into the design process as she shared some visuals and explained how the designers were taking a systematic design approach to understand the customer journey at Carnegie. We learned that designers like Goel didn’t need to be library experts. They only needed to be experts in the design process and using it to improve the library experience. That said, Goel emphasized the importance of working closely with subject matter experts.

It was a great learning example to understand the value of design thinking for “reinventing the customer experience”, as Carnegie Libraries described it. What if we could take what Maya Design did for just one library and instead ask a design firm to apply its design thinking process to the entire ecosystem of libraries. An interesting idea no doubt, but given the breadth and depth of that system, inclusive of all the different types of libraries and many different member communities it almost seems like an overwhelming and impossible project.

But according to an article in the New York Times about some recent projects by IDEO, the design industry’s most globally recognized firm, there is a movement from designing specific products and services to tackling entire systems and re-designing them from the ground up. In this particular article, IDEO’s work for a Peruvian entrepreneur to design a low-cost network of private schools is profiled. Though IDEO has experience in helping some health care and education organizations to re-design their operations for efficiency and a better user experience, the Peru project is far more ambitious in its scale. IDEO needed to design every component of the school system, from the buildings, to the classrooms to the teaching training and even what happens in the classrooms. In the three years since IDEO began the project, it now includes 23 schools.

It got me to thinking, what if IDEO was asked to build a library system from scratch, using no preconceived notions from the current system. Whatever it ended up being, I imagine it would probably be radically different from the way our libraries work now. Two things would happen at the start.

First, the team that IDEO would assemble to work on the project would have one librarian. Everyone else would represent different disciplines such as business, anthropology, marketing, engineering, health care and more. IDEO often brings together a truly diverse squad of individuals to bring many different perspectives to a project. One librarian would bring some expertise, but would eliminate preconceived notions about what the library should be or a host of reasons why certain things wouldn’t work (e.g., “But how would we get the books back to the shelves…”).

Second, the research process would be user centric. The team would probably have less interest in talking to the librarians, except as subject expertise is needed. They would primarily seek out individuals who use libraries as well as those who never do. Observation, conversation and journey mapping are techniques employed to gather data to inform a deep dive about library use. Out of that process would emerge ideas for a library system that would break the mold of the traditional model.

It’s hard to imagine exactly what a design firm like IDEO would come up with for a completely new library system. Perhaps it would be less fragmented than our current structure, and we’d have public, academic and corporate libraries working more as a system, sharing resources and offering more interchangeable services. Library facilities might undergo some dramatic change in ways that would make them more intuitive to the community members and less reflective of librarian practices. IDEO might see a natural fit between libraries and publishing, thus encouraging more libraries to serve as vehicles for writing and publishing.

What I do know is that IDEO would spend time prototyping new versions of any library system they’d design, and that would give both librarians and community members the opportunity to weigh in on how well that system met their needs. While we may never find IDEO tackling the American library system, it is possible that we will see individual libraries connecting with design firms to guide them in totally rethinking what it means to deliver library services. Then again, what if IDEO taught librarians how to do their own systemic redesign? I think more us would discover that design thinking is a path to improving the quality of the library user experience. That would be rewarding for both librarians and their community members.

In a previous post I wrote about appreciating getting personal attention in a retail setting, particularly when it was of the pre-emptive nature. Many retail stores are fine when it comes to good customer service, but too often I need to initiate the transaction by tracking down someone who can help me. It was quite a different experience to have a store employee go out of her way to help me get what I needed – without me asking for assistance – and to get me on my way quickly. I called this post “Greeters – NO; Pre-emptive Support – YES“.

Not everyone agreed. There are some folks who prefer to be left alone to figure out things on their own. They may actively avoid store employees – and they certainly hope there’s no door greeter. I can understand how that can be a turnoff for some folks, but I can support delivering a more pre-emptive support approach in a library. More than a few libraries have sent their staff out roaming the facility for that exact reason – to be visible and available to help and to be proactive in asking community members if they need assistance. It’s not uncommon to have student workers wear vests or other objects so that people will ask them for help.

But it could be that too much pre-emptive support is not necessarily better. At least that’s how Teppi Jacobsen sees it. In a post over at When You Put It That Way Jacobsen share a recent experience shopping at Target – and it wasn’t the good kind of experience. She’s a loyal Target customer, but her last visit has her thinking differently about their relationship. The problem in a nutshell – too much pre-emptive support. Everywhere she turned in the store another customer associate asked her if she needed help finding something or if she was doing all right. Eventually it put her over the edge:

I still love you Target. But if you don’t stop having your people hassle us with that ridiculous question over and over, I may have to shop somewhere else with awful customer service, just to be left alone.

It’s a good point and one we all need to keep in mind when it comes to experience design. Too much of a good thing is not so good for the community member. Perhaps the best way to avoid this type of attention overkill is to centralize the point of pre-emptive support. Perhaps it only happens at the entrance or at strategic points on other floors, such as near a stairwell that leads to a service zone. Staff could communicate about strategies for approaching community members, but doing so in a way that avoids the type of pushy, poor customer service that Jacobsen experienced.

It’s probably more so the case in our libraries that we pay too little attention to individuals who may be in need of help but won’t ask for help for any number of reasons. Being pre-emptive can also mean improving the design of signage to improve wayfinding or doing customer journey analysis to identify and eliminate barriers that cause patron confusion. A better designed library experience is quite likely to cut down on the need to constantly ask if help is needed – and if people are able to navigate the library on their own it won’t be.

Whichever strategies we employ to help the confused or lost community members to find what they do want, let’s bear in mind what may have annoyed Jacobsen the most. It was more than just the number of times she was asked if help was needed. It was the distinct impression that the store personnel who were asking the question really didn’t care whether or not she was finding what she needed, but were only doing so because they were told by managers to keep doing it or because they were bored. That’s a trap we want to avoid. When we do offer help it’s important to make a sincere effort. When we fail at it, they will know.

Velveeta cheese has hardcore users? Who knew? In an age when consumers are focusing on natural and organic products I would have thought that Kraft’s Velveeta processed cheese would be struggling to keep it’s place in the dairy section. While you can forget about finding Velvetta at Whole Foods, the reality is that the product is not only still found on supermarket shelves, but thanks to Velveeta lovers, it is in demand. Few cheese products can in fact claim to have caused a “Cheesepocalypse“.

It wasn’t always that way. As consumers began to show a preference for natural and organic foods, the trend suggested a processed cheese like Velvetta had a shaky future. When Kraft, owners of Velveeta, conducted consumer research they found that the majority of Velveeta buyers purchase it once or twice a year. They discovered something else – that only ten percent of their buyers accounted for forty to fifty percent of Velvetta sales. The individuals in this much smaller, yet active cohort were called “superconsumers”. In their article “Make Your Best Customers Even Better“, the authors state that a superconsumer is defined:

by both economics and attitude: They are a subset of heavy users who are highly engaged with a category and a brand. They are especially interested in innovative uses for the product and in new variations on it. They aren’t particularly price sensitive. Superconsumers tend to have more occasions and “jobs” for a product.

My key takeaway is that understanding superconsumers makes for a big change in the way we think about marketing our services. The conventional thinking is that to be successful we need to keep expanding our services to the non-user, light user or lapsed user. How can we get them to see how great our product or service is? Those who advocate identifying superconsumers and concentrating on them believe success is achievable by finding ways to appeal to these incredibly loyal customers – who are typically demanding more new resources and services. Once the superconsumers are identified, it is easier to connect with them, build a stronger relationship and encourage them to make more use of the library (and share their love of the library with others).

Consider a new approach many academic librarians are trying, the personal librarian. This requires a considerable investment in making contact with every incoming freshmen and possibly transfer students as well. The point is to provide academic support to a new student who is rather unfamiliar with the library services, but it’s also an opportunity to convert some new students in to regular library users. Perhaps that investment would be better applied to identifying library superusers and giving them more personal service. Done well,that might lead to the superconsumers communicating the library story to the new folks on campus.

So how would a library identify its superusers? What are their characteristics, and what distinguishes them from the “heavy user”? It’s about more than quantity. Heavy users may come through the door every day or they might borrow large numbers of books, but that alone may not qualify them as superusers. What differentiates superusers could be:
* variety of the resources and services they use
* willingness to try new services
* they love to tell other people to use the library
* they have an emotional attachment to the library
* have built a relationship with a library worker
* would be angered if we eliminated a service

I’m not sure if these are the right ones, but I believe they suggest we would need to do some new assessment and analysis of our community members to identify the users who demonstrate one or more of these characteristics. Superconsumers, once identified and contacted, are more open to giving permission to the company to send e-mail or text messages. Kraft found it much easier and more economical to just focus on their superconsumers rather than trying to reach everyone. As I’ve written before, no library is ever going to connect with every member of the community – just as Kraft knows not everyone wants to eat Velveeta. The superconsumer strategy may be a better way to engage existing passionate users and encourage them to make even more use of the library.

As the authors suggest, a library can do well by showering those who love the library the most with more attention and caring.